No question stand alone bluray players are a mitigated disaster at this point. I doubt we will see 1440p anytime soon. First it would need to be approved by the ATSC and I believe 720p and 1080i are it. These 1080 sets will be with us for quite some time. Close to 2 years ago analog signals were supposed to be cut off. We are behind on that. Look at how long our NTSC technology has been with us. It was invented in the early 40's, 41 I believe and 66% of US homes still use it today. I would worry about 100% of US homes an HDTV before a super duper HDTV. There were 480p sets made in the early 90's, but the picture was so poor and soft they flopped.

As someone who owns the PS3 for exactly the same reasons, I can't disagree. I think there will be a big push for BD software this year (see the thedigitalbits for Warner's plans for BD releases), but the hardware side of things is pretty pathetic. At the very least, if BD hardware is going to be prices so comparatively high, it should all be full 2.0 profile spec. You have no arguements from me about the foot-dragging on decent, fully-featured BD hardware (or lack thereof).

Same here.
There is a reason I am still using my PS3 for Blu-Ray!
I checked out a Sony BDP-S2000ES Blu-Ray standalone & it sounded way better than my PS3, (amazing video & audio) but since it was only profile 1.1 with no ethernet connection I wasn't going to spend $1200 for it!
I'm waiting for full profile 2.0 players with ethernet before going standalone.

One local dealer told me that HD DVD players can easily be upgraded to 1440P. And that may be their ace in the hole, with 1440P already being discussed as the next gen HDTV's. Blu-ray do not have that capability. They would have to basically redesign their players.

There's nothing magical about HD DVD when it comes to supporting 1440p. If firmware updating could allow them to support a new HD spec, chances are that BD could do the same as well. BD would actually be better suited because the higher bit-rates would do better for these increased-resolution signals.

Comments from any "dealer" about the inner workings of HD DVD or BD products is specious at best. The reality is that hardware on both sides uses chip-based decoders which are probably the limiting factor in whether or not existing devices could be flash-updated for new specs or not.

Regardless, there's no "ace in the hole" having anything to do with 1440p on either side.

the issue is hd dvd has no sufficient titles on the market and the format is not comparable to bluray,however the hd dvd has a excellent sound format but is not capable to reproduced in 1080p,is 1080i but the capacity is narrow comparable to bluray,however i think the quality and versality to the disc is inferior comparable to blu ray i think the hddvd has too short time to recover to loosen because warner bros has sign to bluray,people this is a reality warner bros has a 70% of the market is dominated in titles and also hd dvd is cometing a mistake too bad to low prices the machine,my question is,the quality of the parts of this hd dvd machines is capable to comparable to quality parts to blu ray? the answers is ??????,however sony be hurry up to make a firmware to be capable to installed the playstation 3 to capable to decoded dolby truehd and dts hd master in bitsteam,if sony make this firmware the playstation 3 is the best machine for a price and i think the sony has a key to sucess this matter and i have both format in my home theater hd dvd and blu ray.

david "whatever you call" let me tell you something about hd dvd,first you tell the capacity of disc hd dvd is 45gb,the actual capacity is 30gb [15gb one side or both 30gb] the blu ray has [25gb side one or 50gb both side] and the asoc you tell is aproved that's correct but,let me ask the question for you, WY THE HD DVD HAS SO LITTLE COUNT'S OF TITLES COMPARATIVE TO BLU RAY? ,AND WHY IN THE WORLD WARNER BROS SIGH THE CONTRACT EXCLUSIVITY TO BLU RAY? HEY HEY..... i know what,hd dvd desesperatily try to modifiyng hd dvd machine to format a 1440p but nobody has hd dvd televisions and no movies availabable and the frames per second is 24fs is availavable only in blu ray,let tell you the advice for you,READ FIRST AND EXPERIMENTING WITH BOTH MACHINES AND WATCH AND HEAR THE DIFERENCE IN BOTH FORMAT WILL YOU.